Because the North American gravel season will get underway every year with Sea Otter and Unbound, so too does the debuting of latest tech to shake up the gravel grinding world, from hybridized hydration vest-cycling kits to a 13-speed groupset to strong helmet straps.
And but, amid the bustling tech scene at these races, there are at all times a number of reminders that on the finish of the day, what’s vital is discovering pleasure in using any bike in any respect.
The oldsters from the Colorado-based bike producer Rodeo Labs tapped into the “spirit of gravel” by displaying as much as the Unbound 200 begin line on…prepare for it… Walmart-brand seashore cruisers.
Rodeo Labs’ Founder Stephen Fitzgerald shared the story behind this distinctive method to probably the most arduous gravel races on the planet through Instagram.
Like a number of thousand fellow racers, Fitzgerald and the Rodeo Labs crew arrived in Emporia, Kansas, a number of days previous to race day. The one key distinction: Fitzgerald hadn’t introduced a motorbike.
As a substitute, Fitzgerald and the Rodeo Labs people bought three $200 Kent single pace seashore cruiser bicycles from the native Walmart in Emporia with the intention of using them so far as they’d go on race day.
The Kent bikes function a welded metal body, hi-tensile metal fork, coaster brakes, alloy wheels, a “deluxe” padded saddle and a single-speed drivetrain.
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Rodeo Labs stripped them of components, painted them with “sick fades,” after which reassembled the bikes.
Why go try a 200-mile,10,000-feet-of-elevation-gain route on some questionable Walmart seashore cruisers?
(Picture credit score: Rodeo Labs)
“We goal to finish the Unbound 200 on these bikes, and furthermore we goal to have enjoyable alongside the best way,” Fitzgerald wrote on Instagram earlier than race day. “We have no idea if both goal is definitely attainable. Failure is feasible, and relying on who you ask, possible. And therein lies the attract of all of it: Absolutely the unknown of what [race day] holds.”
Taking up distinctive challenges is a part of Rodeo Labs’ blood:
“Saying that we’re a lab means we’ve bought stressed minds and we need to use them to attempt to make significant contributions to biking,” says the workforce at Rodeo Labs. “If we’ve an concept and it’s ok, it turns into a lab challenge [which could be] something: a race idea…a solution to do one thing higher…[or] an elaborate joke.
What seemingly began as an elaborate joke certainly changed into an emotional journey for the three Rodeo Labs cyclists: all three completed the race – collectively – in 16 hours and 50 minutes with 15 hours of shifting time, almost eight hours after males’s elite winner Lachlan Morton crossed the end line in 9 hours and 11 minutes and six-and-a-half hours after girls’s elite winner Rosa Klöser claimed victory in a nine-woman dash for the win.
Fitzgerald wrote on Instagram throughout two separate posts after the race: “Gravel began as a result of it was enjoyable, and at present it felt like we touched only a little bit of that dwell wire…On the market in these hills, everybody was equal. We have been all simply making an attempt to get there. It’s by no means earlier than been made that straightforward for me to grasp.”
